By Nicole Wakeland
In a time of ecological crisis and catastrophic visions of the future, literary narrative has a crucial role to play in cultivating readers’ ability to live with uncertainty, says Belgian literary theorist—Marco Caracciolo.
“Uncertainty is really a central concept in the way we think about or experience climate change,” said Caracciolo at a recent virtual event hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. “The more uncertainty there is, the more anxious we feel about the future, and contemporary literature can help shift these negative feelings to more positive ones.”
Caracciolo is an author and associate professor of English and literary theory at Ghent University in Belgium. Together with UCSB’s Sustainability and the New Human research focus group he discussed his current book project, Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is really a central concept in the way we think about or experience climate change,” Marco Caracciolo, of Ghent University in Belgium told a UCSB virtual audience last month.
“In contemporary culture, uncertainty is normally seen as something that needs to be eliminated, avoided, or reduced,” Caracciolo said. “We try to shed light on uncertainty to create as much certainty as possible in a given situation.”
Caracciolo even believes there may be value in prolonging a state of uncertainty. By changing negative perspectives of uncertainty to a more sophisticated stance, readers may start seeing the unknowable as something that is not debilitating, but creatively empowering, Caracciolo said.
In order to reach this psychological shift, Caracciolo had identified four different levels in which literary narrative can navigate uncertainty. The author says climate-related anxiety affects the characters in a story. As a character progresses through a narrative, the reader experiences feelings of uncertainty and then begins to embrace the real-world uncertainty inherent in the texts and in the world around them.
Belgian literary theorist Marco Caracciolo’s most recent book, Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene, 2021. Photo courtesy of Virginia Press.
This “acceptance of uncertainty” through fictional narratives, says Caracciolo, can “push the reader out of his or her comfort zone into a more empowering way of thinking about uncertainty.”
Still, Caracciolo acknowledges that what he describes is only one possible response, and not an inevitable response to certain kinds of stories. He said he struggles with how to back up his research empirically and he appealed to the research group to help further his project.
Sowon Park, a UCSB English professor and co-creator of the Sustainability and the New Human research focus group, supported the idea that narrative has a role to play.
“If the mind is essentially a pattern recognizing machine, then you can make the general claim that exposure to certain kinds of thinking would reinforce those patterns of thinking you discuss,” Park said.
Caracciolo welcomed further interdisciplinary collaboration with UCSB colleagues, in an effort to ultimately help people know how to deal with uncertainty.
“The premise is that climate change is here, and there’s nothing we can say to really deny that,” he said. “It’s just a question of managing the consequences, and facing the personal and societal ramifications of our reality.”
Nicole Wakeland is a third-year communications major at UC Santa Barbara who is also pursuing a professional writing minor. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.